


Unravel

by fraternite, shellcollector



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Canon Era, F/M, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-07-12 05:18:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7086907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite, https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellcollector/pseuds/shellcollector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Éponine Thénardier can "unravel" time--jump backward a few minutes or hours and let events play out again, sometimes slightly different from before.  It's a secret little thing that she uses occasionally, to get herself out of trouble or avoid minor accidents.  She's never tried to do anything big with it because, on the whole, she's happy with her life--her family's inn is successful, they live in a nice neighborhood in Paris, and she's in love with a kind and beautiful boy named Marius.</p><p>But when her lover is killed on the barricades of the June Rebellion, she has to try to fix it--even if it means using her power on a scale she's never dreamed of.  Even if it means throwing away everything else she has.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unravel

**Author's Note:**

> Fic by fraternité (takethewatch); art by shellcollector.
> 
> Please note that in addition to the archive warnings, this work contains some brief allusions to child abuse/neglect, suicidal thoughts, and very vague references to events that could be read as rape (all per Éponine's canonically shitty life).

 

 ****The first time, she doesn't even realize she's doing it. Mama's tearing a sweet bun in half--a little snack to keep the girls quiet until dinnertime--but she isn't being very careful, and one half is clearly bigger than the other. Éponine's eyes follow the big piece as Mama hands it to Azelma; the little one goes to Éponine. The bun is shiny with egg glaze on the top, and full of little pieces of cherries, juicy and sweet. Éponine frowns as Azelma's teeth sink into that big piece and then

Then

Then it's as if there was a little tug, somewhere inside of her, just behind her heart--and she's watching Mama tear the bun in half again. It's the same cherry-studded pastry, the same shiny brown top, but the split is different. This time, the half on the left is a little bit bigger, and Mama--just as absent-mindedly as before--hands the big piece to Éponine.

Watching Azelma happily gulp down her smaller half, Éponine wonders what just happened. The strange event, and the taste of burnt sugar, linger with her for the rest of the day.

She's six years old.

 

 

It happens again when she's seven and a half, and when she's eight, and then when she's eight and two months. By the time she's ten, she's learned to control it.

When something happens that she doesn't like, she gives reality a little tug, and

Then

It jumps back to where things were a moment or two earlier--like the way loops pull out one by one around a hole in a pair of stockings. The moment plays out, sometimes exactly as it did before, but sometimes with one little thing different. A teetering cup doesn't fall after all, a guest chooses the green room instead of the blue room, the gust of wind is a few seconds later. Éponine learns to make it work for her, unraveling time and watching it knit itself back up again and again until she gets the result she wants.

Some things she cannot change. The day she breaks the looking glass in the best bedroom, she watches Mama's hand fly up to strike her dozens of times as she unravels the moment again and again, hoping for a different outcome. But it's always the same. Mama knows what she did and she's angry--and Éponine can't get back far enough to undo the breaking. In the end she has to let the beating play out.

As far as she can ever tell, she's the only one to realize what's happening. Nobody else reacts when a blazing curtain is suddenly pink and whole again, and nobody else lunges to catch the toppling lamp just in time. Her parents, her sister, the other children in the village--none of them seem to realize that the things that happen around them have happened a different way, just a few seconds before. Éponine is the only one who holds the old reality in her head, even as the new story becomes true. Maybe it's only true for her, a girl whose reality clings to her in a thousand loose threads, with different versions of people popping in and out of existence around her as she creates and unravels the timelines they're fixed to.

It goes on like this for years. The family's business does better--then worse--then better again, and Papa opens a second inn, this one a few miles down the road toward Paris. Closer to the city, business is a little better, and Papa knows how to make the shabby old building he purchased look much nicer than it really is. A few years later, he has enough money to sell the Montfermeil inn and buy an even bigger inn, even closer to Paris. (Éponine, unhappy at having to leave the village where her friends live, unravels a whole day--the most she's ever done--over and over, trying to prevent the move. She can't change it.) Leapfrogging in this way from inn to inn, they finally make it into the city.

Times are bad, but business is good for the Thénardiers. Éponine gets new dresses and goes for walks in fashionable parks and when she slips and falls on a muddy day she can spin time back and save her dress--but sometimes she doesn't. As she grows from a girl to a young woman, she finds herself using the strange power less and less, philosophizing that this habit of always trying to make things turn out her way is the action of a spoiled child. Perhaps it is better, more grown up, to accept life's little misfortunes and bear up under them with patience and humility. The habit is still there, and Éponine finds herself reflexively taking back hastily spoken words or stopping a dish from breaking from time to time. But more and more, she stops herself, resolving to learn to take life as it comes to her.

 

 

It all starts--and ends--with a boy. A boy she sees in the park: handsome, in a Romantic way; twig-thin, with dark, limp curls that make his sharp cheeks look even paler, with eyes that look sad even when he smiles. He could be a hero in one of the novels she reads before bed each night, and she falls in love with the soft line of his lips and the careful way he shoos the birds from the bench he sits on, as if reluctant to scare them.

They watch each other for a month, sneaking glances across the garden, before they speak to each other. Then they do nothing _but_ speak, for hours at a time; they discuss books and fashion and the law and the flowers and then their conversation continues but the words stop meaning anything because they are saying so much more with their eyes.

His name is Marius Pontmercy, and he is an orphan and a translator and he speaks German to her in a way her tutors _never_ did. She would do anything for him.

Gavroche teases her about her "Gothic lover"--but he also helps her sneak messages to Marius, and keeps watch when they meet behind the inn at night, and talks Mama's ear off in the hallway outside Éponine's room, delaying her just long enough for Éponine to slip back through the window and be curled up with a book and a candle when the door opens.

In April, Marius whispers, "I love you," in her ear. She makes him repeat it in English, in German, in his broken Polish, and she memorizes the sounds and says them back to him, making him giggle even through his tears of happiness.

In May, Marius talks of going to her father, of asking Permission, of a little room in the students' quarter with flowers in boxes at the windows and a set of plain white dishes and a little bed covered with handmade quilts. Éponine shivers with nervousness and delight and promises that if even if her father won't give them permission, _her_ answer is Yes.

In June, there is a revolt in the city. Éponine doesn't think much of it at first, because this is Paris and the summer always brings some "unpleasantness." But it gets bad; Papa actually closes the inn for a day, something that almost never happens. And when it is all over--the barricades torn down, the blood scraped from the cobblestones, the National Guard marching through the streets assuring citizens that everything is back to how it has been--three days pass with no word from Marius.

Frantic with worry, she begs Gavroche for help. Together they rip up an old pair of trousers and rub mud from the garden into a shirt, and he dresses up as a gamin so he can sneak through the parts of the city respectable boys can't go to. He's gone for four hours, and when he comes back he's sober-faced, his knuckles scraped and his eyes still mirroring misery he'd never dreamed of. For a moment, she's sorry to have asked this of him, and then he tells her what he learned.

Marius got caught up in the revolt and was shot in the first attack on one of the barricades.

When she hears the news, Éponine has only a moment to be sad--the tears only just starting to prick her eyes--and

Then

She hasn't even consciously thought about it, but it's June 4 again and the barricades haven't yet been raised because Marius _cannot_ be dead, it _can't_ be true, let it make her a selfish child if that's how it is, but she cannot live in a world where Marius has been shot down in the street.

But she's done this enough, in her childhood, to know that if she doesn't _do_ something, the next few days will play out as they did before, and Marius will just die again. If she wants this to make any difference, she has to do something.

So she goes to Gavroche and tells him the smaller half of what's going on. They tear up the trousers and the old shirt again (the first time, for Gavroche), and he sneaks out in the night with a note for Marius, hastily written and speckled with tears, begging him not to go to the barricades, to stay away from the revolution, to stay safe and come home to Éponine. Neither Éponine nor Gavroche knows where Marius lives--when they played at sending love notes before, they left them for the other to find in a crevice in a crumbling wall at the Luxembourg, too enchanted by the romance of the game to care about practicality--and Gavroche stays out all night trying to find him with no success; he climbs in through the window just before dawn with haunted eyes and dirt on his face and promises to try again after breakfast.

Because even though searching for a single poor translator in a city as big as Paris is like looking for a needle in a haystack, the revolt the next morning is impossible to miss. Gavroche locates Marius on the barricade as the people in the houses all around are cooking their dinner behind closed window shutters, gives him the letter, and convinces him to abandon his friends and their cause for the sake of his lover. In the quiet before the fighting starts, they slip out down a side alley, and are shot by a rooftop sniper.

The news comes to the Thénardiers quickly; the body is identified. Papa weeps silently, and Mama rages, the tears flowing from her eyes without any sobs to break her anguished tirade. _Where did we go wrong? How could we have failed to protect our boy? Why was he out there at all?_ Éponine listens with dead, dry eyes, and says nothing.

Now both her lover and her brother are dead.

And for a moment, she feels a flicker of doubt. Maybe she brought this on them; maybe this is the punishment for her selfishness, for her grasping at more than she is allowed to have. Should she give up trying to change things, so she doesn't risk making them any worse? The first time she acted automatically, without thinking; this time she has the time to think over the decision and make sure she's making the right choice. She has the chance to walk away, to learn to live with the pain, to accept the life that has come to her.

But Marius and Gavroche are dead. She can't let that stand.

 

 

Then

It's the last week of May, and Marius and Éponine are sitting on the roof of the shed out back of the inn, looking up at the stars. They sit out here often--it's right outside Éponine's bedroom window, but high enough up that anyone coming out into the alley to throw out kitchen scraps or to have a romantic moment of their own isn't likely to see them. The steepness of the shed roof just gives them an excuse to hold onto each other.

Éponine is in Marius's arms now, her head leaning back against his shoulder, feeling his jutting collarbone rise and fall under her head with every breath he takes. She can feel the warmth of his body through the fabric of his shirt. They're not talking, and the comfortable weight of the silence around them lets her know they've been not talking for quite some time now.

The first time this moment happened, she wished that instead of pulling time backward, she could stop it altogether, so she could just stay in this moment forever. Now, with the memory of Gavroche's report ("shot in the first attack on one of the barricades") and the two bodies (one tall and lanky, one small and soft) in the back alley, she feels restless, words pressing urgently at her lips.

"There's going to be a revolution, isn't there?" she asks, and Marius starts, almost causing them both to lose their balance.

"How do you know about that?" he sputters.

"It's an inn; people are always talking. It's easy to find out a lot if you're a girl, nobody pays attention to you."

"People are actually talking about it? That's incredible, that's more than we'd hoped for." Marius sits up straight and Éponine has to scramble farther away along the peak of the roof to keep from being pitched off. "I have to go find Courfeyrac, I have to let him know."

"Wait--" she says, grabbing his arm. This isn't going how she'd planned. "No, listen to me. You can't go through with it. I don't think it's going to succeed."

"If people are talking about it, that means they're on our side. The whole city will be at the funeral tomorrow, and they'll join us, and--and France will belong to its people once again."

"They weren't talking about joining you," Éponine says, a little desperate. "They were saying how hopeless they think it is. How no one is going to support the revolution."

Marius quiets, at that, and she feels a stab of guilt for hurting him, even if it's the truth, even if it's to save his life.

"It makes no difference," Marius says finally, his voice low. "Succeed or fail, we will stand up for the people of France tomorrow. We will show

"Please," Éponine begs. "You must stay away from the fighting. For my sake, Marius. I couldn't bear it if you died."

He strokes her hair, but his voice is firm. "You don't understand. I have to do this. It's . . . it's for my father."

"Your father?" He's never told her much about his father, only that he's dead, that his perpetual black clothing is for him.

"He . . . he was a great man who I had the misfortune never to know. My grandfather poisoned my opinion against him, and kept all the letters he sent me. By the time I'd discovered all the lies and deception, it was too late. My father died thinking I hated him, and I lost a great man."

Marius stops to brush a tear from his face, and Éponine squeezes his hand. "I'm so sorry."

When he speaks again, Marius's voice still cracks with emotion. "My father believed that France could be great in the world again. He looked for this greatness at the hand of the Emperor, and for a time I believed he was right, and I resented those who would go the opposite way, putting the rule in the hands of the people. Now I realize that the coming revolution and the war my father fought in . . . they're the same fight. We are both fighting for the glory of France, for the nation's greatness. It was found, imperfect, in the Emperor; we shall see it perfected in the People."

Marius's dark eyes are earnest, and he clutches her hands. "My friends are fighting for justice, for the rights of the people, for the future of France . . . I am fighting for my father's sake. I owe him my very existence, and I repaid him with disdain all my life. Now that he is dead, this is the only way I can give him the honor he deserves."

There are tears in Éponine's own eyes. He's never spoken to her like this before, never trusted her with these secrets. To her dismay, she finds herself even more in love with him than ever. "But I'm afraid you will die," she manages. "Please, Marius, don't--"

"Don't ask it of me, Éponine," he pleads. "I would do anything for you--except for this. Do not ask me to betray my father's spirit."

She loves Marius too much to take this from him.

 

 

It's this simple: She cannot keep Marius away from the revolution, so she must keep the revolution from killing him.

She tries to join the funeral march and gets stopped and sent home by guardsmen. There's trouble in the air, they tell her, and this is no place for a young lady like her.

So she backs up and this time when she rips up the trousers and shirt, they're for her. Her hair under an old cap, her breasts tied down with strips of cloth, soot from the fireplace on her face, she walks right past the guardsmen, unremarkable. She joins the students' march at the funeral, sees it explode into violence and excitement and anger. She's there when they build the barricade, there in the tense hours of waiting, and there when one of the first wave of attackers shoots Marius point-blank in the face.

 _Not real, not real, not real_ , she tells herself as she watches him fall. It doesn't help the sick feeling in her gut.

Then

They're building the barricade again, and she approaches the small, brown-skinned man overseeing the process.

"You should make the right flank higher," she tells him. "They're going to be able to get over. Use the chairs from the cafe on the outside, make it unclimbable."

He stares at her, frowning at her soft hands, her plump face, her educated accent. "Who are you?"

The students are nervous--talk of spies and saboteurs flies back and forth--but Marius recognizes her.

"Éponine! What are you doing here? You have to go home, it's not safe here."

"I came to help. Please, Marius, you have to be careful, they're going to come over the barricade, they--"

"Go home, Éponine--please! I can't worry about you."

They send her away, and she's halfway down the alley when she hears the crack of a rifle and remembers--just in time--how Gavroche died. There's a sharp pain in her chest, but already she's unraveling the hours and

Then

She goes through the day again, and again the students ignore her warnings, caught up instead of the mystery of this strange girl who's appeared in their midst. Hoping to win Marius as an escort away from the barricade (but the snipers--they'll figure that out if they get that far), she pleads fear of being caught if she leaves alone.

Instead of sending Marius with her, they let her stay through the first attack, long enough to scream a warning to Marius, long enough to see him fall, her warning unheard. The guardsmen charge over the barricade and by the time they are finally repulsed, half the students lie dead on the cobblestones, their young faces staring at the sky, frozen in expressions of surprise or fear or pain. One of the few left alive takes her elbow and leads her, half-blinded by tears, away from the barricade through the narrow alleys, and she thinks numbly, _The snipers leave when the fighting starts. I just have to get him through the first attack._ Then she takes a breath, and prepares to go around again.

 

 

She goes back farther--to 5 days before the riot, to 2 weeks before, 3 months. She asks Marius about his father early on, and she convinces him to tell him where the students meet, to sneak her out at night to join them. She becomes a familiar face at the meetings, greeted with warmth, if a bit of bemusement at the innkeeper's daughter playing at revolutionary student. She listens to their plans, comes to understand their strategy, starts suggesting little changes that might keep her beloved safe.

And she learns their names, the stories that go along with the faces she's already seen dead: Combeferre, the doctor who dreams of curing the world's spirit as well as its bodies; Bahorel, who can be furious and laughing at the same time; Joly, who just wants all people to have a chance to be as happy as he is. It's a shock, at first, to be in the middle of a conversation with one of them, so full of fire and laughter, and to have the image flash through her mind without warning: _Bayonet to the chest as he was leaning down to grab a loaded gun._ And she remembers what she'd forgotten: This one, too, she has seen die.

The farther back she goes, the more she forgets. It comes back slowly, as she needs it, as she plays out the hours and the days she took back. When she accidentally unravels farther than she intended, back to the very first day she and Marius spoke, she doesn't remember what it was she came back for, only that something's wrong and she needs to fix it. There's a little voice in the back of her head, the second time they talk, that whispers to her, _Ask him about his father_ , and she does, and he explains about the man's death and his dreams about the glory of France, and she remembers the revolution. She asks to share in this part of his world, and she remembers the barricades. They unroll maps over the table, talk of bullets and powder, and she remembers that Marius is going to die.

She remembers it over and over as she replays these weeks of her life, and every time it's just as hard as the first.

She needs more time. It's ironic, when she can respool time and run it again and again, but no matter how many times she retries it, the five months she's known Marius is not enough time to save his life. The revolution is going to fail--or even when it succeeds, it succeeds at the cost of Marius's life (and Bahorel and Jean Prouvaire's, and sometimes Courfeyrac's or Feuilly's or Joly's), and so Éponine has still failed. There is only so much she can do in a few months to nudge the course of events toward a better outcome. She needs more time with the Amis de l'ABC, more time to talk to people at the inn and plant the seeds of rebellion in their minds, more time to learn to shoot and fight and load a musket.

So she pulls back earlier, to before she and Marius started talking, to before she even met him. She still remembers where the Amis de l'ABC meet, or she remembers that there's _somewhere_ she needs to go, and she recognizes the cafe when she walks past it. She goes back to 1831, to the raw aftermath of the riots of 1830. She runs into Bahorel in a riot outside the palace, and he teaches her to keep her thumb outside her fist when she punches. She accompanies Combeferre on a visit to the slums of Paris where the cholera rages, secretly impressed at his quiet courage, walking calmly among all the miasmas (how does he do it, lacking the assurance of being able to unravel the visit, if it does lead to his infection?); she sees children without houses, men without eyes, women without hope. She develops political beliefs of her own.

Now, instead of in the Luxembourg, she's meeting Marius at the ABC meetings. She watches him begin as a raw Buonapartist, still starry-eyed at the emperor and the glory for France that his military success represents to Marius; still clinging to that Great Man for the sake of the memory of a good man. She watches as the students slash his childish faith in Great Heroes to shreds, and as he knits his beliefs up afterward, keeping his loyalty to his father's memory even as his politics shift, growing as he opens himself to new ideas. She's proud of him.

Éponine's parents get more and more bewildered at their daughter's sudden political awakening, as she out of nowhere (at least in their timeline) starts talking about voting laws and the courts and tax codes; they get more and more scandalized as she sneaks out of the house at night, barely bothering to hide the fact that she's leaving. Gavroche is thrilled and begs to be brought along on these adventures, but Éponine (remembering an alley off the Rue St. Denis and the crack of a sniper's gun) refuses.

But it's not enough.

Lately, she's been going back all the way to the week her family moved to Paris, so she can sneak out of the house the very first morning and join the ABC meeting in the ugly little cafe, the one when Prouvaire drops a whole case full of printer's type (cleaning up the mess wastes twenty minutes, but no matter how many times she unravels the moment, she can't prevent the accident). But the students keep referring to a meeting with a group of workers back in September, two months earlier. "If only we'd been able to convince them," Courfeyrac laments, "we'd be leaps and bounds ahead of where we are now."

Éponine can give them a second chance--a third chance, a fourth, a tenth--if she can just make it to the meeting. She notices that Joly's been drinking a little more than is quite sensible, sidles up to him and asks about the workers' meeting. Gets an address.

Then

She's waking up in her room in the little inn on the square with the broken fountain. She'd forgotten how small this inn was; after her big airy room in the Paris inn, the little bedroom she shared with Azelma looks so shabby. It bothered her at the time, she remembers distantly. Now she hardly needs to worry--even if she weren't more concerned with saving . . . _whoever_ it is she knows she has to save, she only has to stay here for another two months before the family moves into the city proper, back (for Éponine) to the spacious inn with the pretty blue paper on the bedroom walls.

It's not hard to get away. Her parents are just about to sign the paperwork to buy the inn inside the city limits, as well as the papers selling the old inn, the one farther out; they're distracted by the details of the agreements, still trying to nudge the deals as far in their favor as possible. Éponine puts on her oldest, ugliest clothes (at this point, Gavroche is enough smaller than her that wearing his old clothes is not physically possible), ties her hair under a scarf, and walks away. It's still the suburbs, and people mostly trust each other, and it's not hard to convince a farmer bringing his cart into the city to let her ride among the cabbages

The meeting is a little harder to manage. She's not familiar enough with the goals of the Amis de l'ABC in this particular encounter, having only retained a general understanding of their politics, and not their specific strategic plans. And the representatives of the Amis don't know her, although _their_ names--Enjolras, Bossuet, Feuilly--pop into her head as soon as she sets eyes on them. She runs through the meeting two or three times before she realizes she's going to have to go back further. One month isn't enough time. So she goes two months, and then three, and manages to get enough of a foothold with the group to be invited along to the workers' meeting.

It's not until four months after the meeting--this time, a great success, thanks to a few points made at crucial moments, and Éponine's distraction of the notorious gossip who'd been poking around (his intentions harmless, but his reputation enough to frighten many of the workers into keeping their mouths shut)--that Éponine realizes: Something is different. She doesn't remember a lot of the details of the life she unraveled . . . but she knows they were living in Paris before winter. Now the edges of the inn roof are studded with icicles, and she can see her breath in her bedroom in the mornings--but they're still in the little suburb inn, with no apparent plan to leave. When she asks her father about it (as innocently as possible--"weren't we going to move to Paris soon?"), his face darkens and he growls at her to shut up and stop meddling in grownups' affairs.

She doesn't know what happened, but she's sure she can fix it.

She goes back to the beginning of the autumn again. Then to the beginning of summer. Then to the beginning of the year. She doesn't remember how things were the last time she lived these months, but right now, in this life, business is bad. There's a storm in July and a tree falls on the inn, bringing the roof down in the southeast corner and ruining three of the bedrooms. That's definitely new. There's no way they're moving to Paris now; in fact, they may have to abandon the suburb inn and go back to the little one out on the outskirts.

Éponine unravels back to the previous summer, and convinces her father to cut the tree (she doesn't have a clear memory why, but the vague sense that it needs to happen and the image of its thick branches whipping in a gale are enough). It's a brutal summer, and without any shade, the benches and tables out front of the inn are hot enough to scorch; the air inside is heavy and oppressive. Almost nobody comes by for a glass of lukewarm wine, and by the end of the summer, they've already sold the other inn.

Every time she unravels the past, she goes a bit farther, hoping to fix whatever intangible thing shifted and changed her family's lives. But every time, it seems, things get a little bit worse. Azelma is thinner than Éponine remembers her being. Anger settles into the lines of Mama's face and stays there. Papa is more restless and irritable. Gavroche is practically a baby, but he's spending more time out of the house than he did in Paris.

She goes too far, and loses the suburb inn, and she can't get it back, no matter how many times she replays that year. Now they live in the second inn they bought, an ugly, squat little building across the street from a stagecoach station. Most of their customers are men traveling alone, and the girls have to stay in their room with the door latched from eight o'clock every night. They're far enough from Paris now that even when Éponine gets older, she won't be able to go into the city on her own.

And she needs to get into the city. She can't remember why, but there's something inside her straining toward Paris, desperate to get there, to do whatever it is she needs to do, to change whatever it is that went wrong that set her on this path in the first place. When nothing goes right at the second inn--when it becomes clear that her parents' luck is broken and they're going to settle here, sinking their roots deep into the mildewy walls--she unravels her life even farther, and loses the second inn as well.

The Montfermeil inn is a horrible old building, the beams rotting, the upstairs rooms drafty in winter and sweltering in summer. Its visitors are an unruly bunch, spitting on the floor and leaving filthy clothes in stairwells and under tables. Papa squeezes everything he can out of them, spinning their bills out longer and longer until he's run out of extras to charge them, and then sending Éponine or Azelma or even Gavroche with his chubby baby fingers to sneak things out of their valises and coat pockets when they're not watching. And still business is bad and getting worse. Mama waters the wine, fills out the bread with sawdust . . . finally even sells the pretty dresses and hats she'd bought for her daughters. Nothing helps.

Éponine, shivering under too-thin blankets in the little attic room she shares with the other children, lies awake for hours at night, haunted by this feeling that things aren't the way they're supposed to be. There's something she wants--wanted--will want. Something that she had and she lost. She doesn't remember what it is, or what she needs to do to get it. The only thing she remembers is that it's in Paris.

Some way or another, she has to get to Paris.

But the years pass, and the family is stuck in Montfermeil. Even Papa has given up his dreams of doing business in the big city, has contented himself with being the cleverest landlord in Montfermeil, with spinning out stories of how he's fleeced his customers, how much he squeezes from the stupid peasants. Mama stops paying attention when people talk about how fancy ladies dress; she drinks more and more of the wine as she's watering it, and spends most nights in a stupor. The children grow out of their clothes and make do with frocks that are too small, trousers with holes in the knees. Nothing is changing.

So Éponine unravels her life again. She picks the day when the man with the glass eye came to the inn as a touchstone, the anchor that will keep her playing with her life in check: This far, and no farther. She remembers it, very dimly, from before she started all of this (he frightened the girls by popping the eye out in front of them without warning and laughed at their horrified faces), so she knows this day is on the right road--wherever it is that road leads. If she starts here, she can find it again.

The years go by, and business is up and down, but never remarkable in either direction. When Éponine is eleven, all three children get sick--a bad fever and a painful, itchy rash. Éponine and Gavroche get better. Azelma doesn't.

They never get to Paris. By the time she's fifteen, Éponine is convinced this isn't the right path; whatever it is that she's missing, reaching for, is still far away from her. She tugs at the threads, and

Then

The man is beckoning her and Azelma (oh, Azelma, alive and rosy-cheeked again) closer, and then--with a wet splurch--his eye is _in his hand_ and Azelma is shrieking and running for Mama, and Éponine is torn between disgust and the familiar nagging feeling that _she knew that was going to happen,_ that it already happened a long time ago.

Business is good for another year, and then a political crisis in Paris sends the economy in the suburbs spiraling. The family loses the inn, has to pack up what few possessions remain to them on a cart and flee to the countryside before the rest of their debtors catch up with them. They live with Mama's cousin until he kicks them out; then they live in the cart for a while. Azelma is sent to live with an aunt; they find Éponine a place working as a maid in a rich old widower's house. She waves goodbye from the kitchen window as her family trudges away in the rain, but only Gavroche looks back to return her wave.

Six years pass, and she doesn't see or hear from her parents again. She doesn't know how to contact them. The old man is getting sicker and she doesn't know what will happen when he dies; he has a nephew but the young man won't need a maid to do all the things the old man needs help with. And besides, the nephew has already made passes at her more than once, and he'll just be more insistent after the old man is gone. Éponine doesn't know how to get to Paris, or if she would even be in time for whatever she's waiting for. Maybe she missed it years ago and has no idea. She tugs at the years and

Then

It's the man and the fake eye again, Azelma crying in surprise and fear, Éponine's face twisting in disgust in spite of herself. Gavroche notices and waddles over, crowing, and the old man has to move quick to rescue his eye from the toddler's enthusiastic teeth.

The inn must do well, Éponine knows. She doesn't remember why she needs this, or what will happen to her and her family if the inn fails, but she knows she needs something, and the inn's success is tied up with it. She works as hard as she can, cleaning up after the guests and smiling charmingly as she welcomes them through the front door and sneaking into their rooms to lift their purses when they're busy in the outhouse. She actually refuses the offer of a new doll ("you need the money for the inn, Mama, and I don't mind playing with Marie-Catherine for another year"); her father starts paying more attention to her, smiling at her and calling her "his girl."

Éponine is still a child, and she can't do very much--but her little bit can make a real difference. Business gets better and better, and Papa starts talking about an old inn up the road that's for sale--a cockroach-infested death-trap under the current owner, but in his hands, it could really be something!

Then, one January night, a drunken guest brings his candle to bed with him, and the whole inn goes up in flames--and Mama, Papa, Azelma, and Gavroche with it.

Éponine stands barefoot in the snow and watches her home burn, and she almost wishes she hadn't woken up at all. Her face is wet with tears that she doesn't remember crying. People from the town come running with buckets, but they quickly give up on the inn and throw their water on the surrounding buildings, trying to keep the fire from destroying any more of the village. There are sharp cracks and pops from deep inside the inferno, as crockery and glass bottles split in the heat.

The embers glow all through the next day and into the evening. When the winter has pulled the last of the warmth from the charred wreckage, Éponine stands up and starts walking west, toward the city. It's not a conscious decision--she's not doing any thinking at all at the moment--but there's something inside her pulling her in that direction, and she follows.

Two days later, her belly is aching with hunger and her hands and face are chapped from the cold and it's like something snaps inside, waking her up. She's not going to survive like this. The streets of Paris are not a good place for a little girl all alone. Even if the thing she needs--whatever it is--is there, this cannot be the right path. So again, she unravels.

She replays the years again and again, always a little bit different, never right. Sometimes they're richer; sometimes they're begging for bread on street corners. Sometimes they have more children--little brothers and sisters that Éponine never knew before, who she forgets as she unravels the years and they no longer ever existed. Sometimes things happen to Azelma and Gavroche, and it's just Éponine left. Sometimes Papa leaves them. Sometimes it's Mama who walks away. Sometimes they lose the inn and become traveling peddlers, selling medicine and petticoats and pure silver spoons made of lead and paint. Sometimes they jump straight to breaking and entering. Sometimes they sell their teeth, their hair, their pretty young bodies. It's never right; she never finds whatever it is she needs.

The man with the glass eye no longer scares Éponine; she's seen the trick a hundred times and doesn't even have the energy to pretend shock when he pops out the slimy ball, grimacing and waving it in their faces. "She's got spirit, that one has," Papa crows, squeezing her shoulder so tight it hurts. "You can't frighten the daughter of a wolf."

The daughter of a wolf. Éponine likes the sound of that.

 

 

When she finally achieves victory, it's without any thrill of success. She's too cold to feel much of anything. Éponine's hands are chapped from the winter wind, her feet clumsy in rag-stuffed wooden shoes. She eats once every day or two, if she's lucky. She has only one set of ragged clothes, most of them stolen from a half-blind old laundress. But she's made it to Paris.

She almost gave up on Paris years ago, this time through, when the inn failed and they spent three years wandering around the countryside in a cart, weaving back and forth toward and away from the city. But then Papa fell in with his friend Absolon, from "the good days" when Éponine was just a baby, and Absolon's friends have iron bars and lock picks and a good hideout in Bagnolet. Two years later, Absolon is floating facedown in a ditch in Bagnolet, Papa's knife in his back, and Papa is moving the gang to Paris.

She's here, at last, but she doesn't know why. She starts taking long walks at night, along the river, around the cathedrals, through the stinking alleyways the police don't look into. It's cold, and her shawl is full of holes, but she's still rather be outside than trapped in that room with Montparnasse's filthy talk veiled in wit and Claquesous's disquieting stare. She wonders why she's here--what it is in Paris that she's looking for.

Then one day she wanders into a garden. (It's strange to be here, dizzy with hunger, among all the wealthy people with their gloves and canes and afternoon strolls. To say she doesn't belong here is a gross understatement. But then, she never feels like she belongs anywhere, these days. She's a ghost, drifting through the world of the living.) She's not even looking for anything--but she finds him anyway.

A slender student in a dark coat, reading a book.

A young man with well-cut cheekbones and a mouth that looks kind and dark eyes that seem to really _see_ the world.

A boy with eyes that will cry over the beauty of the stars and a mouth that will laugh through a forbidden kiss, snatched in secret.

Marius.

She sees him, and she _remembers_ him, and finally--after seven years, after _seventy_ times seven years--she knows why she had to get to Paris.

She watches him all afternoon (memories crashing back over her at every tilt of his head, every gesture of a hand) and then follows him home to an ugly little hovel called the Gorbeau House. Night is falling, and her teeth are clattering in her head, and her stomach is pinched with hunger pangs, but seeing Marius is like coming home. _Yes_ , she thinks. _This was it. Now everything will be all right._

She fixes the address of the house in her mind, and

Then

Her father doesn't know why Éponine is so interested suddenly in finding them new lodgings--but he also doesn't care, since the Gorbeau House is--impossibly--cheaper than their current wretched hovel. Moving the family there is the work of a few hours, most of the time spent in wheedling and threatening until their old landlord drops his attempt to make them pay for the damage to the walls of their little room. When Papa realizes that their next-door neighbor is some kind of a fine gentleman--he considers himself poor, but he eats almost every day--he immediately takes credit for the move and sends Éponine over to test how easily the young man's pity can be pricked and how carefully he watches visitors' hands.

Not carefully at all, it turns out. Monsieur Pontmercy blushes over nothing and is so busy trying not to meet her eyes that he doesn't see her pick up the pair of gloves from his table and tuck them inside her blouse. She doesn't need to chatter to distract him like she usually would do on a little job like this, but she finds herself talking anyway, telling him about her family and their problems, surprising herself by almost telling him the truth in a few places among her usual tear-jerking patter.

M Pontmercy may be a naive idiot living in the wrong part of town, but when she tells him she's afraid her father will resort to crime to put food in his children's mouths, that she's afraid she'll lose him to prison, his lips tighten with emotion. She trips over her tongue for a moment; the story is so ridiculously overwrought she thought he'd recognized it at once as a beggar's lie. She's been telling it more for fun than out of hope of getting something for it, playing the game out of habit and boredom.

But M Pontmercy believes every word of it. How naive, how distant from the real world must you be to believe such rubbish? How _good_ must you be yourself to assume that the ragged child eyeing your wallet is telling you the truth? His eyes are so dark, brimming over with a sincerity she hasn't seen in a person's face in years.

 _Oh._ She feels a tug in her chest, just above the stolen gloves. _So that's why we needed to move here._

She watches him as he unfolds the letter, laying it out on the desk in front of him and carefully flattening the paper, one crease at a time. His fingers are slender, the skin smooth under the ink stains. Something deep inside Éponine remembers--for a moment--what it's like to have fingers like that. Then she looks down at her filthy, chapped hands and the memory fades again.

She wants so badly for him to think better of her, to see her as something besides the gutter-rat who crawled in with that ridiculous story. "I know how to write, I do," she says. She snatches a sheet of paper from his desk and a pen, and scrawls, _You can't frighten the daughter of a wolf._ Marius stares at it (not at her, is he avoiding looking at her, is it the black eye, are the lice in her hair that obvious) as if he doesn't know what to do with it.

"You see, I went to school when I was a little girl," she tells him. "My sister and I both did. We weren't always like we are now. Once, we--" She breaks off, reminded of her missing teeth, her filthy clothes. It's impossible to think he'd ever see past what she is now. She can't even do it. A bitter laugh breaks from her mouth.

He glances up at her, nervous even though she's the one humiliating herself before him. "I don't have much, but I would like to help you in any way I can." He digs in his pockets and comes up with a 5-franc piece. "Will--will this help?"

"Thank you, monsieur," she says dutifully. She _is_ grateful--whatever other goals she has, she does want to eat tonight. But at the same time, she feels like she hasn't gotten at all what she came here for. "You're so very kind."

She puts the gloves back before she leaves. He doesn't notice.

 

 

A lot of things are different from before. She doesn't know much, but she remembers that when she met Marius before (long before, not the few months back of the unraveling right before this one), they were in the sunlight. Not in a dim hovel smelling of piss and onions and garbage. And Marius didn't look at her like she was a flea-bitten mutt--something to be pitied, but also kept at arm's length.

Éponine has a lingering feeling that her family is different, too. Mama didn't always have those dark circles under her eyes; Azelma used to sing. Sleeping all together, the four of them shivering under a single blanket, is new. So is fighting with each other over moldy crusts of bread and mushy carrots.

Gavroche isn't with them anymore--he split around the time the family got to Paris, and he's probably better off for it--but Éponine distantly remembers that when they lived in Paris before, he lived there with them. He would be ten years old by now. It's strange to think that there is a person she once knew who now doesn't exist for her.

 

 

She's walking down by the river. Sometimes she doesn't pay attention where she's going and she suddenly wakes up to find herself halfway across the city. (This would have been dangerous for her once, in the neighborhoods where she walks; now it doesn't matter since one glance at her clearly shows she has nothing worth stealing.) It's hard to keep track when her stomach is so empty; things get distant and fuzzy sometimes

But now, for a moment, everything around her is clear; the edges of railings and the stone arch of the bridge knife-sharp. The water is so, so black. She can feel the icy chill coming up off of it, even now, in April, and she shivers. Her feet are bare, her blouse so ragged she might as well be shirtless, and she wonders what the hell she's doing.

Has she lost her mind? She's thrown away everything for the love of a boy, and now she wonders, is it even love? Marius doesn't know her; Marius sees her as just one more filthy wretch, a pitiable young woman in a bad neighborhood. Poverty has made her poor and ugly and desperate, and Marius doesn't love her. She wonders if she loves him. She thinks she did, once. What she feels now . . . her head's too dizzy with hunger to be able to tell if it's love or an obsession.

She leans back against the stone wall of the bridge, aching for something solid and sure in this fetid whirlpool of a world. She doesn't know what she can trust in. Everyone around her seems unreal, a ghost without substance, now that she's unmade and remade them so many times. Her world has blossomed and died around her over and over. Is what she breathes and touches real, or is it just another story, the creation of a feverish child? When all else failed, she used to at least be able to trust herself, that small, burning knot of resolve in the center of her chest. Now she's not so sure she isn't a ghost as well. She's been made and unmade as many times as the rest.

She shuts her eyes and calls up images of Marius--his long, dark eyelashes; the sensitive line of his lips; his slender fingers; that look of utter sincerity and intelligence that lives on his face when he's not self-conscious. She tries to pin down what she feels for him, to put a label on it. She wants to keep him alive, she's sure of that. But is it love, or is it selfishness--trying to keep the big piece of cake for herself, like a spoiled child, unwilling to lose anything beloved?

She can't say.

A part of her almost wants to throw it all to the wind, to unravel back to the old man with the false eye, back to that first day with the cake, back to before she could even speak or walk or laugh--to wipe her slate clean and start anew. To go back far enough to _forget_ Marius once and for all; to stay away from him, away from Paris, away from this dirt and cold and cruelty. To accept whatever life she finds herself in and to stop struggling against fate. To let Marius die.

But she's already destroyed enough of her life (she doesn't know what, exactly; all she knows is the hollow feeling in her chest that wails _things are not how they once were_ ) by going back over it, and in the end, she's too afraid of what might happen if she unravels any more. She has to hold onto what little she has left; if she lets it go, she might end up with nothing at all.

 

 

Buried in the underbelly of the city, she has no idea the revolt is coming. She's lost the memory of the exact reason why Marius is going to die, and when it happens--again--it hits her completely by surprise. An ordinary day spent fishing flotsam out of the river in hopes of finding something usable or saleable (yielding a fetid old shawl that Éponine is more than desperate enough to wear, once it dries, and an almost-new top hat which she can sell if she can just get the smell of shit out of it), and she comes home to find her father cackling, practically dancing around their little closet of a room in his glee: There has been a riot, and tomorrow there will be bodies in the street.

And with that the memories crash back over her: Marius, the barricade, the smell of gunpowder and blood and the crack of rifles. The sniper in the back alley. The guardsman Marius doesn't see. Marius falling from the barricade, blood drenching his chest so quickly. Dead before he hits the ground, sometimes.

She's seen him die dozens of times; heard about it dozens more. She feels the shock and horror of them all again, all piled up together, and her knees go weak.

Then

She turns away from the river, shouting back an instruction to Azelma to try under the next bridge (a top hat, she remembers, nearly new, caught in a tangle of sticks and rope against the base of the stone archway), and takes off toward the center of the city at a run.

It's not difficult to find the riot. It began at the funeral procession for some dead general, and set a quick-burning fire all across the city before settling into barricades. She goes to three different barricades before finding Marius's--snatching up a piece of furniture from the street and carrying it in, glancing at the faces, leaving when nothing strikes a spark of recognition. At one place, the revolutionaries more careful than the others, she is confronted as a spy, threatened with a knife, and she sighs and pulls back to just before she entered their street. She puts the stool back down and moves on to another barricade.

She finally finds Marius--and then she watches him die in the fighting (shot point-blank in the first attack) and can do nothing. She replays the fight again and again, tries to pull him out of danger, to steer him toward a different part of the barricade, to trap him in the cafe. No matter what she does, he dies in the first twenty minutes of fighting. She goes back to earlier in the day, earlier in the week, earlier in the month, tries to study the pathways that take him to the barricade, to see how she can disrupt them. But his fate seems to be set in stone.

What did she think she could do about it? She must have gone back so far for a _reason_ , to prepare something well in advance for the hour of need, but she has no memory of what it was. A nagging thought whispers that whatever it was would be useless now; too much has changed. She remembers meetings, upstairs rooms filled with excitement and too much tobacco smoke, but though she's now fairly certain she could find those cafes again if she tried, she's much too wretched to set foot in places like those.

Again and again she goes around, and eventually finds her life staked out between two markers. The first post is the morning after the Rue de Chemin Vert robbery, when the Patron-Minette celebrated by getting drunk and turning into wild beasts; living through that night once was too much, and she swears to herself that she will not go back so far that she has to do it again. The ending post, the moment she cannot let stand, is the moment of Marius's death. Always she goes right up to the moment when he falls, always hoping that _this time_ something will be different and he will survive, her heart falling every time he dies even though she's seen it happen a hundred times.

It gives her four months. She lives those four months over and over, unwilling to go back or forward any farther, unable to change the way anything plays out. She wakes up again and again on the stone floor of the old hideout, drags her bruised body out to the street to rinse the blood from her mouth, and looks up at a sky that is always the clearest, faintest blue. She takes a slow, shaky breath, already seeing everything that she will live through in the next four months. On the eleventh of March, she tells herself, she sneaks into the theater to enjoy a few hours of warmth while a blizzard rages outside. On April second, an old woman leans out of a carriage on a whim and buys her a hot meat pie. On June fifth, Marius dies, and then it's back to this same morning, to the film of ice on the public fountain and the throbbing of her swollen eye. Maybe this is her curse, she thinks: to be trapped in an endless loop, watching him die over and over again.

She moves her family to the Gorbeau House every time around; she's not sure it's worth the trouble, but it's the easiest way to make contact with Marius, and at least it gives her the chance to see him every few days as he goes in and out on his mysterious wanderings.

Every time, her father sends her to Marius with a letter, and she loses track of the different lies she tells him to draw out that five francs.

"My father was wounded in the war, fighting for Napoleon; when it's cold he weeps from the pain, but he never makes a sound."

"My sister is sick. She falls down and shakes and screams as if a demon is inside her. We've spent everything we have on doctors, but nothing does any good."

"We were actors once, but our leading man--my father's best friend--ran off with our cash box. We had to sell our costumes and sets, and who will listen to a play without the colors and the silk and the pageantry?"

Occasionally she slips up and tells him the truth, about the cold water under the bridges at night and the way the street skips and buckles under her feet when she hasn't eaten in days. Sometimes the stories don't make any sense at all.

It doesn't matter what she says; his answer is always the same. Fumbling in his pockets, eyes charged with emotion but unwilling quite to meet her own, he says quietly, "I don't have much, but I would like to help you however I can." And then that 5-francs piece, held out to her.

In her kinder moods, she takes it as a sign of his good heart that it doesn't matter what story she tells, that he always gives her the money; just the sight of someone less fortunate than him is enough to arouse his kindness. Other days, she thinks it means he's not listening to what she's saying at all.

"What's the point of all this?" she asks one time, snatching the coin from his hand. He looks up at her in bewilderment, but it doesn't matter, he's going to be dead in 81 days, and then they'll be able to do it all over again. "Maybe I don't love you at all. Maybe there's something wrong with me, maybe I'm broken inside the head."

Marius's face flushes as he doesn't seem to know what to do with his eyes or his hands. "Mademoiselle--" he begins, but she cuts him off.

"It's all wrong, I've fucked it all and I don't think I can put it right again. I don't even remember what 'right' looks like. This is all I've got left." She hears the ugly wildness in her laugh but can't bring herself to care enough to try to hide it. "A five-minute conversation where you don't even listen to me, and four months of rainy weather. For that, I threw away the inn, the pretty dresses, the books, everything. I think my little brother may be dead, did you know that? We used to have rugs on the floors, now we don't even have tables and chairs. But I can still read, I never missed out on that. Love is a wonderful thing, Monsieur."

She goes home and sits against the wall and cries and laughs and nobody pays any attention until her father comes home and makes her go out into the street, to "make that racket someplace else."

 

 

Then, one of the dozens of times she's gone through the loop, something is different. She's taken to haunting the street outside the cafe where the students meet for the first few nights of the loop, before she moves her family over to the Gorbeau house--mostly because if she sits at the hideout listening to the same inane argument between Babet and Montparnasse she is going to go absolutely _mad_ , but also because it gives her a chance to see Marius those nights. It's just a glimpse in the darkness; he doesn't know her or speak to her, but this is what her life has become, that this is what she lives for now.

But one time, he doesn't come. Everything has been the same so many times in a row that Éponine assumes she drifted off and didn't notice him, so the next night she pinches herself and watches the door like a hawk--and _still_ he doesn't come. She's sure of it this time.

Two weeks later, she's standing on Marius's doorstep, her father's letter clutched in her hand, shivering with cold and with the fear that something happened to Marius, that he's hurt, that he moved away from Paris for no reason, that he was never anything but a dream in her own head. She hasn't set eyes on him since the beginning of this loop.

But he answers the door when she knocks, and lets her ramble on about her family's problems (today she doesn't have much spirit for invention, and just falls back on the old standby, the war wound and the fever last winter that carried away her brother and almost took her sister as well, and please Monsieur, they haven't eaten in days). She's so overcome by relief to see him still where he ought to be that at first she misses it: Something is different.

Something, in a scene that has been exactly the same every time she's lived it, except for her unpredictable rambling (exactly the same even with her unpredictable rambling), is different. The room is the same--there's nothing there to change in Marius's meager furniture and the small jumble of books and papers on his desk--and while Éponine changes every time, it never makes any difference. It's Marius himself who is different.

He's sad--and Éponine is surprised by the realization, because Marius was never particularly cheery before. But he'd been at least content, then. Now he's weighed down with sadness, distracted by some problem he can't solve.

"Monsieur," she asks, breaking off in the middle of a story about slipping on the ice in front of the cathedral and losing a coin she'd hoarded for weeks. "What's the matter?"

Marius's eyes widen in surprise, but then he sighs, apparently deciding that he wants to talk badly enough that even his filthy gutter-rat of a next-door neighbor will do for a listener. "I've lost the love of my life," he laments.

For one beautiful second, Éponine's heart leaps. _He remembers!_ Then she gets control of herself, roughly grasping the hope and shoving it out of sight, where it belongs. "What's your love's name, M'sieur?"

"Ursula," he sighs.

"And how did you lose her?"

"Her father moved them away, and I don't know where they've gone. I used to meet her in the garden, and then I followed them to her house, but I think her father must have seen me, for they don't come to the garden anymore, and their house is dark and empty. I've looked for her every night for two weeks and found nothing."

She opens her mouth to call his attention back to her father's letter, but then closes it without saying anything. It's not clear _why_ things are different this time. But after _scores_ of times when everything was exactly the same, she shouldn't dismiss this lightly. There might be a reason why things are different.

She presses Marius for more details, and he, glad to talk about the girl he loves (maybe just glad to talk in general, Éponine thinks; his translation work must keep him closed up in his apartment for much of the day, and if he's been missing meetings he hasn't been talking to his student friends), tells her everything, including what she really wants to know: The exact date he met the girl.

It's not very helpful. It's a day near the very beginning of her loop, one of the days where she's already decided on the best way to play it. Now she sticks to the same choices every time she lives that day, never deviating from them--and she doesn't even go near the garden. Whatever caused this change, it wasn't her.

But--the thought occurs to her suddenly as she's taking her leave of him, the same 5-francs coin she gets every 4 months warm against the palm of her hand--if he's spending all his free time looking for this girl, then he's not going to the revolutionary meetings. And if he's not going to the meetings, perhaps he won't go to the barricade.

 

 

Marius spends nearly a month wallowing in his grief, and Éponine is satisfied. But then one afternoon a young man, obviously wealthy despite his revolutionary whiskers and careless dress, stands at the door to the building and flings pebbles at Marius's window until he wakes up. Marius stumbles down the stairs to let him in (too late to save the man's hat from the clutches of a quick-footed gamin), and they talk in his room for nearly an hour.

Éponine, leaning against the wall with the hole in it and trying to appear completely bored, can't hear everything over the tremendous noise Papa is making over his toothache, but she hears Marius's tone shift from despondent to cautiously interested to outright excited. By the time the red-haired young man leaves (she _knows_ him, but she can't recall his name, only the bright flash of his laughter and, for some reason, the taste of sweets), Marius has combed his hair, tied his cravat, and is busily setting to work on a political pamphlet.

He's even more active in the revolutionary group after his hiatus than he'd been previously, and though Éponine tries to catch him on his way in and out, dropping clumsy comments about gardens and pretty ladies and love in hopes of distracting him again, he moves in a daze of revolutionary fervor, and she's not sure he even hears her.

On the night before the barricade, after following Marius through the darkened city to the wine shop, after hearing him join in the excited speeches and promises and cheers about the morrow's success, she makes a decision: She has to find this Ursula.

 

 

It's not difficult. She holds the date of their meeting in her head and unravels just that far and no farther. Her family is still living on the outskirts of the city, but nobody notices when she slips away to find Marius's lodgings in the run-down Gorbeau House. She follows him to the park, makes note of the pretty girl in the black bonnet, and later follows her home.

It's still winter, and if she stays away from home too long she won't be welcome back, but she keeps watch over the house anyway, observing the pair's quiet life, their simple routines. She learns where they go every day, how they spend their quiet hours. When the old man moves them away (and he _is_ good, they pack so efficiently and lightly she mistakes the move for a day-trip and misses her chance to follow them to the new address), Éponine knows where to look for them. They avoid the park, but they still visit the poor neighborhoods and the churches with their gifts of charity.

It was _so_ easy. And Marius, for all his languages and books and translations, brooded over the problem for weeks with no luck. He couldn't even get the girl's name (Cosette Fauchelevant; not Ursula) right. She feels a little shiver in her chest as she thinks about it. It takes her a moment to recognize the feeling as a laugh.

Looking at Cosette, wrapped in her beautiful wool cloak, at her pretty dark curls, at her soft hands carrying baskets of warm bread, Éponine feels something else--a flicker of recognition, tinged with wrongness. _Things weren't always like this_ , she thinks, though she doesn't know where this certainty comes from, this feeling that at one time she herself was the one who was warm and well-dressed and Cosette was the filthy, starving wretch. Is it an echo from a past life, from before she started unraveling her existence? She brushes it away--it doesn't matter, that life doesn't exist any more. It might as well have been a dream.

In this present life, she is faced with a decision: Does she continue on this track, or go back and use the information she's gained, trusting that the Fauchelevants will make the same choices she's seen them make this time? Even though she's watched events play out exactly the same way dozens of times in a row, now that she has something she wants, she doesn't quite trust the world to leave it there for when she returns. But if she goes home now, after two weeks of absence, her father's going to beat her, if he lets her in at all. Besides, the streets are full of snow, and her feet are blue and black in places inside her wooden shoes. She's not sure at this point she can even make it home.

So she unravels everything again, lets Marius's pursuit of Cosette (Ursula) play itself out as before, lets him stew in his loneliness until the time comes for her family to move to the Gorbeau house. She pours out her invented woes while he sits unhearing, consumed by his own misery, and gets the 5-franc piece. Then she takes one of her father's letters and walks out to the old church where she knows Monsieur Fauchelevant likes to hear services.

He's an old man, with hair white like a shock of cold water to the face--but there's something about the way he moves that tells her there's a tremendous strength hidden underneath his old, worn coat. When she sidles up next to him as he's leaving the church, he's bigger than he seemed, and for a moment, she's afraid. His arms are like tree trunks; he could snap her neck in a moment, if he wanted. (Not that he has any reason to harm her--she doesn't mean him any evil--but lack of reason hasn't stopped anyone so far in Éponine's experience.)

But she's a daughter of a wolf and she's watched her beloved die dozens of times, and nothing can hurt her.

"Please, Monsieur," she says. "My sister is sick."

"Who are you?" the man asks, peering into her face as if he hoped to recognize her.

"Nobody." She shuffles in the dirty snow, trying to work some feeling back into her numb feet. "We're just hungry. And Monsieur, you seem like a good man, you and your daughter; I see you--"

The man's eyes widen and he thrusts the letter back at her so suddenly she slips in the slush and falls. By the time she's picked herself up, her soaked skirt clinging to her bare legs, he's disappeared in the crowd.

She sighs, unravels the hour, and tries again. This time, she doesn't mention the daughter.

This time, he agrees to come.

 

 

To Éponine's surprise, he brings Cosette with him. She stands in the middle of the Thénardiers' ugly little room in the Gorbeau House, blinking about prettily at the squalor. Her face is transparent with sympathy--but not disgust. But of course, this kind of misery is not new to her; she's seen it many times before on her charity visits. Éponine is just one more wretched creature to be pitied.

She goes out to sit in the hallway and sulk while Papa makes much of their dirty clothes, the broken window, Azelma's bleeding hand. She knows she'll answer for it later--she still has the traces of a bruise over her left eye, and Papa likes to have visuals to illustrate his story of the street robbery that claimed this honest family's last handful of sous. She doesn't care.

Later on, after the old man's scuffed boots and Cosette's pretty little shoes step quietly past her corner in the hallway, she goes to Marius's door to admire the fruits of her labor, to see if he's sufficiently distracted from revolution, maybe even to collect a tiny thanks.

Marius is not giddy with delight when she lets herself into his rooms, but even more anxious than usual. He grabs Éponine's hands with his gloved ones, his eyes fierce (but not really seeing her, she thinks).

"Find her for me," he begs. "I'll give you anything you want."

"Anything I want," she echoes mournfully. He doesn't seem to hear. It's just as well.

"Her name is Ursula." He runs a hand distractedly through his hair. "Please, Éponine. Promise me you'll try to find her."

She promises, and Marius's face relaxes, though just a fraction.

"I have to go out," he announces, pulling on his gloves and his bottle-green coat. "I have to--there's something I need to see about." He pauses at the door, his mouth open as if he's about to say something. But then he shakes his head, distractedly, and leaves without saying anything.

That afternoon, the old man returns to the Gorbeau House, alone, with a bundle of warm clothes and a much smaller packet of money. Éponine, eyeing the scrap of knitted fabric she sees peeking out between a heavily mended coat and a stained but sturdy blouse, silently congratulates herself on orchestrating things so nicely--Marius has his true love, and Éponine will get a good pair of woolen stockings.

But there's something nasty in her father's eyes. "'Ponine, 'Montparnasse!" he barks. "Go outside and keep watch. One on each end of the street, you know how we do it."

Montparnasse is gone almost before the words leave their father's mouth, and Éponine has no choice but to follow. She stands shifting from foot to foot in the slush and wonders what's happening inside. Her restlessness attracts the eye of an officer, and she has to quickly pretend to be searching in the snow for a dropped coin, muttering to herself distractedly until he gets uncomfortable and his eyes slide away.

It's been nearly an hour, and she's beginning to think they've just forgotten about her again when a heavy hand falls on her shoulder. She's twisting out of his grip before she even realizes there's an officer behind her.

Éponine turns to run, but there's another policeman in front of her, and as she glances around for an escape route she realizes she saw the whole gang--or most of them, at least--being marched down the alley, arms behind their backs. So the job's gone south, and she'll probably have to unravel the whole day anyway. She might as well hang around and find out what happened first.

And then she notices her father--limping in the snow, a huge lump above his eye, a defiant grimace on his face. Over his faded rags, he's wearing an almost-new coat of bottle green with shiny buttons. Éponine recognizes the coat--and the dark red color of the new stains about the lapels.

Azelma tells her what happened later that night, when they're huddled together by the wall of the big room where the prisoners are told to lie down to sleep. Marius had overheard the gang planning the job (he must have discovered the hole Éponine chipped in the wall between their apartments). He'd sent for the police, but they were late in arriving. He panicked and tried to shoot Papa through the hole in the wall. Naturally, Guelemer dragged him out of his little room and bashed in his head. The police arrived a few minutes later to arrest the gang, dropping a bland thanks over the body of their informer as they stepped over it on their way out.

So Éponine tries to fix it. She warns the old man about the planned attack, but that just convinces him it's time to get out of Paris altogether. She doubles back to the Gorbeau House and catches Marius peering through the hole in the wall--but she can't convince him to stand by and do nothing when his beloved's father is in danger. She goes to the police herself and tries to convince them to come earlier, and earns herself a cuff on the ear from an officer who thinks she's a crazy vagrant.

When she goes way back, it's more to give herself extra time to think than from any clear plan of what she's going to do. It's not until she finds herself standing in Marius's room for the first time again, rummaging absently through the papers on his desk, that the idea strikes her.

"We wasn't always like this," she tells him. "I had dresses like a fine lady once. I know how to read, you know. I went to school and wrote letters."

She takes a scrap of paper from his desk and scrawls across it: _The cops are here_. She waves it in Marius's face, and he blinks, startled out of his reverie about his lost love.

"I don't have much," he mumbles. "But I'd like to help you in any way I can." He starts to dig in his pockets.

Coin in hand, she plants the note in the corner of his desk, and goes out to look for the old man at the church.

Two weeks later, she's standing on the street corner, waiting for the police and hoping Marius is better at thinking creatively than she really believes he is. Now that she's expecting it, she can pick out the heavy tread of the policemen's good boots coming down the alley toward her, and for a moment she considers running. But Azelma doesn't know what's coming, so she'll have been arrested again, and Azelma is the easiest way for Éponine to find out exactly what happened. Besides, she has a faint memory of a big man--maybe a prison guard--with a pock-marked face, and a feeling that maybe she needs to be there in prison.

She shuffles her feet impatiently in the snow and she doesn't run.

 

 

The knowledge that Marius is alive, _alive_ , carries her through the two weeks of prison. The work is horrible, but so was trawling the river for half-rotted clothes and frozen garbage. There isn't much food, but there wasn't before, either. And it's actually a little warmer in the prison than in the drafty room at the Gorbeau House. The worst part about it is that there's no way to get away from the other prisoners--and the guards. That, and missing the day in late March when the confusion at the ticket window allows her to sneak into the theater for a few hours

When she gets out of prison, she gets her bearings in the world again--Marius still in his room at the Gorbeau House, Cosette and the old man still on the Rue Plumet, the eccentric aristocrat still showing up in her carriage at the corner of the Rue des Tournelles to buy her a meat pie. Everything is just as she left it.

For a few precious weeks, she leaves it that way. Then she sighs to herself, collects Marius, and brings him to Cosette's garden.

They're instantly brilliant with happiness, delirious with love. Marius accosts Éponine the next day and gives her a twenty-minute speech on the beauty of love, and a 5-franc coin. Éponine lets the coin fall and walks away--but she's back again that night to follow Marius to the Rue Plumet. And the next night, and the next.

She doesn't know why she spends her evenings lingering outside Cosette's garden, just close enough to hear Cosette and Marius's murmurs, just far enough that she can't make out the words. Maybe their love is like a fire on a cold night, drawing her in even though she knows it will burn her. Maybe she's just that nervous of Claquesous.

Maybe she's done this before, some time so far back she has no memory of it at all, and she knows what's going to happen.

Her father brings the whole Patron-Minette to rob the house. They don't seem concerned about stealth; their wooden shoes clomp along the alleyway, and Montparnasse drops a bundle of lockpicks with an echoing clatter. They're expecting such an easy job, they've let their usual caution drop.

"What are you doing?" she asks them.

Papa scowls at her. "You're supposed to be down by the cathedral, watching for that rich widow." The others push past her, except for Montparnasse, who stops to lean against the wall in front of her.

She sidesteps Montparnasse and his smile, all perfect teeth and bad breath, and trots after the gang. "You must have the wrong house; there's nothing here worth taking."

Babet's laugh is full of gravel. "The little bitch is trying to tell us she can see through walls."

"I scoped it out, just like you said to!" she protests. "It's just a couple old people, they don't even have dishes or candles or--" Above them, a pair of candles flickers to life in the attic window. Brujon raises an eyebrow.

Éponine takes a deep breath, and tries again. "You should go down to that house with the painted roof-tiles, the one with all the chimneys? It's much better, they have ever so much more stuff than this house. And there's no dog, I checked, but this one--"

"Now you're starting to piss me off, girl," Papa growls. "Get out of here, before we decide you should work for your keep."

Despite her protests, they break into the garden. She hears Marius's shout of alarm, and then Cosette is screaming. And then

Then

"You're supposed to be down by the cathedral, watching for that rich widow."

Éponine shakes her head. "I been checking out this house, just like Babet said to," she says. "There's nothing here. You should find a different place."

Babet laughs, but she cuts him off. "It's just an old man and woman, and a stupid girl, they have nothing to steal, just a few old things."

"Shut up," Papa barks. "You're making such a racket, you're going to bring the police down on our heads."

It gives her an idea. She takes a few steps backwards down the alley, unnoticed by the gang, who are peering through the garden gate while Papa works the lock. Éponine takes a deep breath and starts to scream. "Help, help--thieves! Send for the police! There's thieves in the Rue Plumet! Thieves and--" Her next backward step brings her abruptly into a body, and she feels the cold edge of a knife against her throat.

She'd forgotten about Montparnasse.

"Want me to, boss?" His breath is hot in her ear, unsettlingly quick. Papa, his face twisted with annoyance as he scrambles to pack up his tools, nods. But then

Then

The gang is still making their way down the alley, quickly approaching the spot where she leans against the wall, just out of sight of the garden. She takes a deep breath, steadying herself for what she knows she needs to do, and steps out in front of Babet, pushing him back with one hand. "Not this house," she says quietly.

"What's this now?" Papa's voice is rough.

"It's your Éponine, I thought she'd run off," Babet growls. "Get out of here, girl, we've enough hands already."

"Éponine, you're supposed to be down by the cathedral, watching--"

"This isn't a good house," Éponine says, though she knows it won't work. "They're poor and don't have anything nice, what's the use in robbing them? It won't be worth your while."

"Look who thinks she's the big gang boss now," Montparnasse drawls, glancing at Papa and grinning at the anger that rushes up over his face. "Giving orders like she owns us."

"Tonight, I do give the orders." Éponine's hands are trembling, but she clenches her fists and takes a step closer, meeting all their eyes steadily in turn. "And I say you're not getting in here."

She is suddenly so aware of how small she is, how thin and starved her body is, how high and reedy her voice. If they decide to, they can walk right through her like she's nothing; they can cut her and bruise her and even kill her. This is the moment of decision.

"You're not going to rob this house," she repeats, setting her feet wide and puffing up her chest. "I'll scream and pound on the shutters, I'll wake the household up, I'll bring the police running. I'll do it, I will."

And she sees Babet take a half a step back.

"Bitch," mutters her father.

She laughs wildly. "I'm no dog, I'm the daughter of a wolf. You think I'm scared of you? What can you do to me--kill me?" She spits at her father's feet. "What difference does it make if I die here with my brains beat out by my father, or if I drown in the river a year from now? Do whatever you like, I say you're not to rob this house, and so you shan't. I ain't afraid of nothing!"

Brujon wrinkles his nose. "What's wrong with the girl?"

"Want me to--?" Montparnasse makes an ambiguous gesture with his knife. But the others, following Babet's lead, are backing away.

"I signed on for iron bars and panes of glass, not lunatic cunts," Brujon mutters.

"There's other houses," someone else says. "Where you don't have to fight past crazies to get in."

"You'll pay for this, girl," Papa hisses, as the gang disintegrates.

Éponine doesn't make any sign that she's even heard him, but her mind is turned to the garden behind her, to the image of Marius's hand clasped with Cosette's. _I'm sure I will_ , she thinks.

But for all that, a shiver of satisfaction runs over her as she watches the gang melt away into the gloom. She did it. They were all lined up against her and she, she herself, stopped them. She feels like she could do _anything._ She feels--for the first time in many weeks--happy.

 

 

What she can't do is keep the old man from deciding to move to England. She might find a way to prevent the move, in the end (she almost certainly could, given enough attempts--and there seems to be no limit to the number of times she can unravel and replay the same weeks), but she's never let time move on far enough to find out. Even if she were sure she could prevent them moving, she can't convince Marius that she'll succeed--and so there's no point. If Marius believes that Cosette is lost to him, then he goes to the barricade in his despair, and he dies there. She's tried many times to explain her curse to people--Marius included--in an attempt to throw the weight of _already having lived it_ behind whatever argument she's making, and they have _never_ believed her. So she can't stop the old man's paranoid impulse, and she can't stop Marius from plunging into despair over the supposed loss of his beloved forever.

Which means she can't stop him going to the barricade. And once he's there, there's no way to keep him alive.

At long last, she's come to the end of her thread.

It's an evening of June 5, just a few hours before she will unravel the days yet again. She's lingering outside the building where the old man and Cosette have moved temporarily, one of the many safe houses she's seen the man use in her accumulated years of following him through flights from various dangers, imagined or real.

There's a tiny little garden--more of an outdoor closet, really, where buckets of washing water can be emptied over a scraggly little tree like a hiccup and a set of stunted, sullen bushes with shiny dark leaves. A stone bench sits under the tree, still littered with last winter's dead leaves. A little grate once let the owner of the garden wheel a cart in and out of the enclosure without tracking dirt through the house, but the lock is so rusted it probably hasn't been budged in years. Éponine crouches in a boarded-up doorway just down the alley from the grate, leaning her head against the crumbling plaster and staring at the place where the light from the old man's kitchen lamp spills across the cracked stone path between the bushes. In her filthy clothes she is nothing but a patch of shadow.

She's not sure why she's here. She could say she's studying the two of them, trying to pick up clues to how their minds work, flaws that she can exploit to steer them in the direction she wants to move them. But really, she's just tired--tired of being cold and hungry all the time, tired of beating her head against impossible riddles, tired of struggling against a life that seems to get worse and worse every time she lives it, tired of watching Marius die. Her head is full of the noise of the city in revolt, and this sad little forgotten garden seems the only place where she can find quiet.

The spill of light across the flagstones gets much bigger, and then is cut off with the sound of a closing door. A minute later, Éponine sees Cosette slip through the garden, a spirit in a dress of summer white, her tiny feet making no sound. She wanders for a few minutes, her shoulders slumped. She stops by the grate, one soft white hand brushing the rusted metal, and Éponine knows she's remembering all the times she talked to Marius through the garden gate back at the other house.

"Cosette!" the old man calls, and Cosette jumps, hurriedly brushing a hand across her eyes.

"Coming, Papa," she sings, but there's the faintest catch in her voice. She moves out of Éponine's line of sight, and while Éponine hear the low murmur of voices, she can't catch the words of the conversation. She wonders if the old man heard that tremble too--or has Éponine watched Cosette for enough hours by this time that she knows her better than her own father?

A few minutes later, the kitchen door shuts again. Éponine doesn't move from her spot, crouched against the doorway. There's no reason to stay here, but she doesn't want to get up yet. She's not ready to go through it all again.

The old man is so quiet and his clothes so solemn--it's like he's Éponine's reflection, another shadow creeping through Cosette's bright orbit--that Éponine almost doesn't notice he's stayed out in the garden. He shuffles silently across the tiny courtyard and stands with one hand against the ugly little tree, almost leaning against it. One hand drifts toward his face, squeezing the bridge of his nose, gently pressing his fingers against his eyes. And Éponine knows that he saw Cosette's sadness just as surely as she did--and it is killing him to see her sad and not be able to make it better.

The old man lets out a heavy sigh--the first noise he's made since Cosette left him alone in the garden--and turns to the stone bench. Even though he's in his own walled-in garden, with only a single gate the width of a wheelbarrow leading out to a deserted alleyway, he still stops to look around him in all directions before stooping down to push the stone bench to one side.

Éponine's mouth falls open as the man kneels to remove a bundle from a hole that was underneath the stone. That bench was carved from a solid block of rock, and the old man just slid it across the ground as if it were a pile of old laundry. She knew he was strong, but she had no idea just how strong.

Then it hits her: The old man can save Marius. Éponine's given everything she can, and it's still not enough, but the old man is a dozen times cleverer than her, and a hundred times stronger. And he cares for Cosette, she knows that for sure, and so he wants her to be happy. He's on the same side as Éponine in this: Both of them, for their own reasons, need Marius to live.

She slips across the alleyway, letting her feet scuff the pavement (she's crept up silently on the old man enough times to know the results will not be good unless he has warning of her approach), and peeks in through the grate. The old man is sitting on the bench--now back in its original spot--as still as if he's been there for hours. She clears her throat and he pretends to just notice her now.

"What do you need, child?"

"I have a letter, M'sieur." She rummages under her blouse and brings out the letter she never thought she'd show to anyone. "It's for the lady."

"Who's it from?" He comes toward her across the garden.

"A gentleman at the barricades, M'sieur. I dunno his name. He sent me to give a letter to the pretty lady who lives here. There is a lady here, isn't there?" She cranes her neck, peering around him into the dark corners of the garden.

"Let me see it."

She hesitates, blinking at him warily. What will make him most certain to read the letter himself? "The gentleman made me promise I'd give it straight to the lady, not to nobody else."

"I'll make sure she gets it," the old man promises, his hands already reaching greedily for the secrets, and Éponine has to stifle a smile.

"I dunno," she says to complete the gamin act. "He give me ten sous to give it to the lady."

"Here's twenty," the old man says, and she snatches up the money and hands over the letter. He makes a show of putting it away carefully in his pocket, but she sees the way his thumb plays at the flap.

As she's trudging off down the alley, the old man calls after her: "Child!" She turns to see him standing in the doorway, the letter in one hand, frowning after her, and for a moment of panic she wonders _what did I do wrong what did I forget?_

But he asks, "Where are you going now?"

She shrugs. "Around. Back to the barricades, I guess, to see what happens."

His frown deepens. "The city is a dangerous place tonight. Find yourself somewhere safe and stay there. Don't get caught up in something too big for you."

She can't help but burst out laughing at that--explosive, ugly laughter that has more than a little of a sob in it as well--and she has to hurry away before he can demand an explanation.

 

 

The old man comes to the barricade, just like she knew he would, with a gun and a National Guardsman's uniform and a plan to get people away safely. He just gets there half an hour too late, and Marius is already dead.

Éponine waits, longer than she's ever gone, pressed into a doorway on the side of the street opposite from the wine shop. She watches as the students repel the National Guard and then clean themselves up, tending their wounded, rejoicing over their victory and mourning their dead at once in a wild tangle of emotions. The red-haired one (she used to know him, she thinks, but his name is an echo in her memory too faint to make out) notices her and comes over to check if she's all right. She waves him away, shaking her head at his offer of food or help. She doesn't want to go inside the wine shop--even though she knows it's not real, just another bad timeline she's going to unravel soon, she still doesn't want to look at his body. She thinks there might be tears on her face, but it could just as easily be the rain.

She begins to doubt her intuition as the minutes pass and still the old man doesn't show; then she starts to hate him. Finally, he arrives, earning his way in by killing a sniper that Éponine makes a mental note to watch out for later. She follows him into the shop, hanging far back, afraid of being recognized and not quite willing to trust him again yet.

Still, when she sees the way his face falls when he sees Marius's body, the way he carefully checks for a pulse again and again just in case, the way his shoulders slump when he finally sits back in defeat--all her resentment melts away. She was right about him all along. He's come to save Marius, for his little girl's sake; it isn't his fault he doesn't know he needs to come sooner. With this ox of a man on his side, Marius will be all right.

She just needs to keep him alive through the first attack.

 

 

This is how it happens: The defenders of the barricade do well at first, but they only have so many guns, and they can't reload as quickly as the guardsmen can. After the first few volleys, the guardsmen are able to start climbing the barricade, where the students will fight them hand to hand with sabers and sword-canes and iron pokers, eventually driving them back again. But before that happens, Marius, bending down to take the loaded gun the student with a lisp is handing up to him, doesn't realize they're starting to come over the top. One of the first few guardsmen to reach the crest of the barricade shoots him point-blank, blowing his chest apart.

She shouts out a warning, and Marius looks over his shoulder and still doesn't see the man who comes to shoot her. So she positions herself on the other side of the barricade to call to him, and the guardsmen catch her and drag her away from the fighting before the first attack happens. The next time, she hides in a house on the other side of the barricade, and when she shouts to Marius he recognizes her voice. She sees his lips form her name, his eyebrows tightening in confusion, just as the soldier empties his rifle into his chest.

There's a familiarity to it, a deeper feeling of _having done this before_ than she usually feels when she replays moments she's already lived through. At first she dismisses it, but then she flings a rock at the National Guardsman's head and knows even before it hits that it's just going to knock his ridiculous hat off, and she understands. This is a moment she's tried to change before. It must have been far, far back, in one of those lives she doesn't remember but gets echoes of sometimes, those lives when everything was different. But this isn't the first time she's tried to keep this particular instant from happening.

For a moment, she wonders if she should give up. If she couldn't change things then, why should she hope to do it now?

 _No_ , she tells herself. _I'm stronger now, more clever, more determined than whoever I might have been before. And I have no fear, because I have nothing to lose._ She recalls how she stopped her father--her _father_ \--from attacking the old man's house! She's succeeded where it seemed impossible, and she can do it again. She's the daughter of a wolf, after all.

So she tries to put herself near Marius right before the fighting starts so she can push him out of the way in time. He recognizes her and sends her out of danger, getting one of his friends to carry her bodily off the barricade. The sniper in the alleyway gets the big man, and she doesn't bother to wipe the blood from her face because Marius is already dead by now and

then

She waits until the fighting starts to approach Marius, but the green, incompetent fighters are running here and there and she can't get through and she has to watch Marius die and

then

She hides in a cabinet that's being built into the barricade when nobody's looking, and when the guardsmen start coming up the barricade she tries to climb out but a broken bed frame blocks the door and she can only get it open wide enough for Marius's blood to splatter her face and

then

She watches the battle over and over and over again until she's memorized the paths of the fighters, each frantic dash, each disoriented stumble, and mapped out a path among them. She waits until the last moment and then dashes through the fighting and grabs the musket the student with the lisp is handing up to Marius, pulling it away and in the confusion delaying Marius enough that his head is down when the guardsman comes over the barricade. The man shoots him anyway, only the angle is different and it's Marius's head that's blown apart instead of his chest, and Éponine blinks away the blood and

then

She dashes through the fighting, grabbing a loaded gun out of someone's hands on her way. She shoves in beside the student with the lisp and tosses her gun to Marius, saving the seconds he always loses when the student fumbles the handoff of the loaded gun; Marius's head is up and he sees the guards climbing up the barricade, and he turns away for an instant to shout a warning to the others, and the guardsman shoots him and

then

She dashes through the fighting, barking her shins as she scrambles up the barricade with a discarded saber. When the guardsman's head comes over the top of the barricade, she slashes wildly at his face; he pulls back, cursing, and Marius hears it and his head snaps up, and he and the guardsman stare at each other in shock before shooting each other and

then

She dashes through the fighting, barking her shins as she scrambles up the barricade to grab Marius's arm and drag him off-balance and out of the way of the guardsman's shot just in time for another guardsman to bayonet him through the throat and

then

She dashes through the fighting, barking her shins as she scrambles up the barricade just in time to grab the barrel of the guardsman's musket and drag it away from Marius but there's no time and before the barrel clears her own chest there's an explosion and

 

 

The blackness clears from her vision. She looks down at her chest and sees all the blood. A cold shiver runs through her as she realizes how lucky she is that she didn't die instantly, that she's stayed alive long enough to wake up and unravel the shot that would have killed her before she bleeds out.

Then she realizes that everything has gone quiet behind the barricade, the shouts and percussive rifle fire from before replaced with the quiet moans of the wounded and the murmur of low voices. Around her, the revolutionaries are gathering up fallen weapons and fighters, resting to breathe heavily or gulp a drink, binding up wounds, consoling and encouraging each other in groups of three and four.

Marius is standing over by the wine shop, leaning a little light-headedly against the wall and clasping the arm of the red-haired student. He's alive.

The first attack is over.

The old man will be here soon.

Marius is going to live.

The sky is dark overhead and a light rain mists down over the shattered furniture of the barricade and the blood-soaked cobblestones. The water runs down her cheeks like tears.

"Éponine?" Marius is standing over her; did she drift off? He falls to his knees beside her. "Éponine, what are you doing here? My god, you're hurt!" She cries out as he tries to lift her, and his eyes widen. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to--let me call someone--Courfeyrac, somebody, come--"

"No," she says. She tries to tug at his arm, but her fingers slip numbly off his sleeve. "It would be no use."

"What should I do?" Marius wrings his hands. "How did--"

"I'm cold." The silly words fall from her lips without thought. Of course she's cold; hasn't she been cold for months on end now? Sometimes it feels like she's been cold her entire life.

But when Marius wraps an arm around her shoulders and she feels the heat of his body through the fabric of his shirt, it stirs up a long-forgotten memory--nothing more than this, that at one time in her past, she and Marius sat side by side like this and she could feel his warmth on her skin. A smile twitches at her lips at the thought that her life (one of her lives, somewhere in her tangled and complicated past) held such a precious memory.

"I have a letter for you," she tells him. Her hands fumble with the paper as she takes it out of her blouse. "It's from Cosette. She tells where you can find her and begs you to talk to her father. You will meet him, and you will not die, but go away with Cosette to England and live forever."

She laughs brokenly, and finds herself choking on blood. Marius grips her hand.

"You must promise me one thing," she says when she can breathe again. "In payment. You said you would give me anything I asked, remember? You gave me that 100-franc coin, but I didn't want your money. I want . . . I want you to kiss me, after I die. Just one small kiss, on my forehead. I'll feel it, I'm sure I will. Will you promise me?"

"I promise," Marius says earnestly. Tears swim in his dark eyes; he is weeping for _her_ , she realizes, crying at the death of this ugly, wretched creature. He barely knows her, and yet he's promised her a kiss and held her close so she won't die cold and alone, and oh, how _good_ he is, how happy she is that he will live!

"You know," she whispers, and Marius leans closer to catch the words. "I think I was a little bit in love with you after all."

Because surely this is love--true love and not a selfish obsession--to be lying here with her blood seeping hot onto her chest and the knowledge that she could take this all back as easy as thinking and yet to be filled only with the joy at the thought that _Marius is going to live_. She tries to laugh, but there's no air left, only the taste of blood and of burnt sugar and

then


End file.
